Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)

Dir: Lucio Fulci

Clunky dialogue. Check. Atrocious dubbing. Check. Characters behaving stupidly, far beyond plausibility. Check. Ridiculous statements like, "look! a helmet! it must be four hundred years old!" apropos of nothing? Sure, why not? Lucio Fulci's outrageous splatter classic is one of the few films that is both unfairly maligned and enormously overrated, depending on which angle you're looking at it from. The aforementioned flaws threaten to drag it down but, if you're willing to overlook that, it's almost impossible not to enjoy such an energetic, enthusiastic take on the zombie genre. The premise is loose (something to do with voodoo on a mysterious Caribbean island, raising the dead and Tisa Farrow's search for her lost sailor father) but the direction is taut, Gionetti De Rossi's sterling special FX are amongst the sickest, most convincing I've seen and some of the more grandiose set-pieces stand the test of time perfectly (notably the underwater zombie, one of the most stunningly shot sequences in horror history, for my (blood) money). It might not be the most intelligent of efforts, but if you don't like this one, there's a good chance you just don't like horror. ***1/2